Welcome to the GAIA@ARI pages!

Gaia is the next big astrometry mission by the European Space Agency ESA, to be launched in late 2011.

Gaia will measure the positions, parallaxes, proper motions, luminosities and colours of more than 1 billion stars with unprecedented precision, complemented by radial velcities and spectra of 100 million stars. Main goal is to elucidate the structure, formation and evolution of the Milky Way.

The scientific data reduction for the Gaia mission is being prepared by the pan-European Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC).

Special tools for the efficient use of the vast amount of astrometric data provided by Gaia are developed by the related Marie Curie Research and Training Network "European Leadership in Space Astrometry" (ELSA), funded by the European Union.